Jake and My Heart Free Me From a Scary Rat’s Maze

I had one of those moments yesterday, the kind where suddenly everything feels completely wrong.

It begins with a weird sense of displacement — in my case, sitting on the floor of my yoga room/office in the middle of my asana practice. “What am I doing here?” or something like it started the internal conversation. “Who made me a mother who doesn’t have time for real friends? How did I end up on a quiet street full of kids in Asheville? Since when did I look at buying groceries as a social event?”

In the space of a breath, I have convinced myself that sometime during my life in — I don’t know, maybe Washington, D.C., someplace where I was single and young and knew how to drink a martini — sometime in the midst of this young, hip, I-can-do-anything life I fell asleep and woke up . . . here.

That’s when the moment hit. “Have I really been following my heart?” I started asking myself. “Or have I abandoned it for what everyone’s supposed to want — a loving partner and a kid and a house with a deck in the backyard?”

I’m not sure, I sniffed, tears coming to my eyes, that I’m where I’m supposed to be.

Funny, Where Your Heart Can Lead You

After a few minutes in child’s pose, taking deep, calming breaths, I asked myself what had me so frightened.

Part of it was the fact that I am not only a mother, but I write about it. It’s become my thing.

Five years ago, before I met Mike, I was pretty comfortable with the notion of mothering nothing more genetically connected to me than my basset hound Roxanne. I had spent some time in my early thirties planning how I would have a baby if I didn’t manage to get married by thirty-five. (So very scary now how young that sounds.) The lawyer in me headed straight for an anonymous donor; the law professor at a Jesuit university timed it for after I got tenure and could flaunt my shame; the business person in me — well, there isn’t a hint of business sense in me so I didn’t really spend much time figuring out how I was going to afford artificial insemination with a health plan handed down indirectly from the Pope.

Eventually, though, I let go of the idea that I had to have a child. I realized I was completely complete without one. I relished my single life. I dedicated myself more and more deeply to yoga. And then I met Mike and my heart led me in the direction we expect our hearts to lead us. It’s almost embarrassing, finding myself one of those women I used to find sort of uninteresting. And now I write about those formerly uninteresting I’m-a-mom things.

But fretting about the stranger writing YogaMamaMe is something I do all the time, and it doesn’t make me want to throw up like I did yesterday.

What was making me feel so Sliding Doors, I think, was the feeling that my life doesn’t move any longer. I have no time, and little motivation, to break the comfortable pattern that allows me a decent amount of sleep and me-time when I live with a toddler. So much easier to hang out with my best friend, who also happens to be Jake’s father, going to the Ramp Celebration in Waynesville (turns out it was Sunday instead of Saturday, so we never got to eat any ramps) or just playing on that deck while he mows the lawn. Go out? See a movie, go on a date, drink too much? That takes planning, and by the time the sitter is here I’m kind of tempted to kick off my heels and join her in front of the t.v.

My fear, then, seemed to stem from this perception that I’ve hit a dead end. I’m a rat in an evil scientist’s maze. I was making my way through it just fine and then they threw this gorgeous baby in and I scrambled toward him, whiskers twitching, trapping myself in a cramped little cubby where there seems no choice but to curl up and sleep out the rest of the experiment. No rat treats for me.

I reminded myself that I live in a mighty beautiful rat maze — a lovely craftsman on a street full of friendly neighbors, shared with a loving husband and an amazing, blue-eyed little boy just starting to show off his snippet of Irish heritage with the reddish cast his hair has lately acquired.

Yes, I whined. That’s what makes me feel so TRAPPED. It’s Jake’s turn to change and grow, and I have to sit here and watch.

Following Means Following

Everywhere, it seems, we are pelted with images of parents suggesting that once you have a kid you cede the life changes to him. We are quintessentially at the sidelines of our kids’ soccer games. You can catch us in the audience at the school play, providing transportation to music lessons and softball practice, sitting next to our child as he does his homework at the kitchen table. Our careers are no longer fulfilling, or if they are, we become bad, distracted parents. Our drive to succeed in business is now solely about filling that 529 account so we can send our little geniuses to college.

No wonder as Jake becomes more independent I become more certain I’m being left behind.

But the fault with my thinking yesterday was the notion that my heart has led me here as a final destination. As if it has hitched a ride with the child I love so much and is ditching me so it can carry on with him. When, after all, Jake has his own heart and is already starting to find his own path (which, at the moment, very much involves balls).

Sometimes life slows down. Sometimes an asana practice slows down too. It’s a chance to take advantage of all the heat and energy we’ve generated. In asana practice that means stretching warmed muscles. In life maybe it means pouring all the goodness we’ve created into a beautiful start for our children.

But, in asana practice, after we’ve stretched for a while, we are ready to move into the intensity of back bends or a long inversion — which require a different type of strength from the standing poses that began the practice, a deep opening and strength that come only after we have moved and stretched. So, too, in life we will move from the opening and stretching our new children offer us to deeper challenges that require us to move in new ways.

Jake is a mere sixteen months old. Seems like he’s been around a whole lot longer, but sixteen months . . . less than half my time in college; less time than I managed to stick it out at the law firm; less time, even, than my prepubescent infatuation with Shaun Cassidy lasted. Jake will get older, he will spend less and less time with me, and I will find the strength to start moving again.

Not that I’m not moving now. I’m about to launch a website, for goodness sakes. Okay, so it’s about being a mother, but it’s about following my heart as well. And I sure don’t think it ends here.

Setu Bandha Sarvangasana (Bridge Pose) to Urdvha Danurasana (Upward Facing Bow) — You Wanna Move in a New Way?

Too often, when I’m in an intense backbend, I forget all about moving. Our instinct, when we’re working so hard, is to see if we can stay in the pose until the teacher releases us. Which is not a bad thing because, next time you do it, you may notice that it’s really, really hard to stay perfectly still.

The key to backbends, in my book, is to constantly lengthen your spine. It’s not the sort of movement we’re used to — swinging our legs back and forth to walk, waving our arms around when we want attention, crouching down a million times a day to pick up a twenty-five pound toddler. Lengthening your spine is far more subtle. It’s about exploration, going inside and finding more space and more ways to create it. When you’re doing that while holding a pose that requires more than a little bit of strength, you realize just how far you’ve come in your practice. Most of us start yoga with pretty tight backs, and they open so beautifully.

Focusing on lengthening your spine in a back bend seems to me the loveliest way to appreciate the slowing of our lives when our children are young. It seems like we’re not moving — because we’re not out at bars talking to not very interesting people made moderately more interesting by dint of the alcohol we’re consuming. In fact, we are finding more intense, subtle, advanced ways of moving, ways made possible because our children have made us slow down and stretch in ways we didn’t think possible.

And add this thought — as you lengthen your spine you’re also opening your heart. Just to remind you that it is still there for you to follow.

Setu Bandha Sarvangasana (Bridge Pose) Instructions

Urdhva Danurasana (Upward Facing Bow) Instructions

Tagged as: motherhood, self, yoga